Sunshine Fund helps Triune serve the homeless

Nov. 25, 2012

On Sundays mornings and evenings, Greenville’s Triune Mercy Center is crowded with people attending one of its two weekly worship services. As the workweek arrives, the church continues to bustle on a daily basis, but the focus shifts from worship to service.

The Triune Mercy Center, located on the northern outskirts of downtown, hosts an array of programs during the week, mostly aimed at assisting the area’s homeless.

It is one of the local agencies that receives money each year from the Holiday Sunshine Fund.

The center and its 58 partner churches offer four hot meals a week, a grocery pantry and clothes closets for adults and children, along with mental health counseling, computer training and access to drug rehab. And that’s not even the whole list.

“The church is just in use a whole lot, and we encourage that,” said director and pastor Deb Richardson-Moore.

While the church officially got its start in 1900, most of the programs are much newer, having begun in 2005. And even the more basic programs didn’t begin until 1989.

“From 1989 until 2005, it was soup kitchen and clothes closet,” Richardson-Moore said. “So we’ve added all of the rest since 2005.”

In January of 2011, the center added a mental health worker to its staff, and Richardson-Moore said that addition resulted in a surprising revelation.

“We have found out only in the last year how much mental retardation we were working with, that we didn’t recognize,” Richardson-Moore said.

“A lot of them, we just assumed were crack addicts. And they might have been doing crack on top of it, but really at a basic level, it was a very, very low IQ. She (our mental health worker) really started pointing out some things, and getting them into state disability, and into housing.”

Richardson-Moore said it has been very satisfying to see these people from among her congregation gain not only access to housing, but also a sense of belonging at the Triune Mercy Center.

“It’s so satisfying watching some of them progress, and also watching them become a real central part of a worshiping community, where they’re accepted, where they can come and volunteer, and just feel very much a part of things.”

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Another of the more prominent services offered at Triune is the provision of hot meals four times a week, a feat that requires the assistance of about 1,500 volunteers from their partner churches through the course of a year, Richardson-Moore said.

“They buy the groceries, cook it and serve it at Triune,” she said.

Those meals are available Tuesday and Sunday evenings and Saturdays at lunch time, with an additional meal after the Sunday morning worship service exclusively for Triune church-goers.

And no matter what day of the week it is, you can find at least one Narcotics Anonymous group meeting at the church, and there’s a good chance an Alcoholics Anonymous group will be meeting, too. The Triune Mercy Center hosts a combined 14 meetings of those groups every week. That tends to be a common challenge for the population served by the center, said Richardson-Moore.

“So many of the people who come to us have been abused at some point in their lives, and are addicted and homeless, and just absolutely at the bottom, and so there’s just all sorts of work that has to be done,” she said.

For individuals who are serious about defeating a drug addiction, the center will also provide help in accessing beds in drug rehabilitation programs throughout the Carolinas and Georgia.

Of course, that life transformation often takes years to develop, but the fruits are worth the wait, Richardson-Moore said. She remembered a man who was one of the first that the center assisted with drug rehab after the program began in 2005.

“He had been a drug addict for 30 years, and he had been homeless for about six,” Richardson-Moore said.

The Triune Mercy Center connected him with a drug rehabilitation program, which he successfully completed.

Richardson-Moore said the man is celebrating six years of sobriety this month. He now has a job at one of the center’s partner churches, and has his own home and car. In addition, he serves on the center’s board of directors and has been on two mission trips to Haiti.

“That can be done, but you have to want it,” Richardson-Moore said. “We can’t want that for somebody. Somebody’s got to be ready to really change their lives that much.”